September Update: Denouement

Hey team! There's a bunch more of you than there were last time I did an update. Welcome to the party, pals.

Stats

When I put out This Is Phil Fish, it was considered a viral video for doing 170,000 views in a week; The Cost of Doing Business did 197,000 in a day. It's the biggest opening of any video in my channel's history. Having spent some time in a low-level panic that my career couldn't recover from a yearlong hiatus, that's a load of my mind. It's also brought in some new backers - hi new backers! - which is going some way towards recouping the money I lost whilst I was AWOL. We have a ways to go before we break even, but it's clearly possible so long as I don't disappear for another year.

Reception has been surprisingly kind, given the subject matter. The Alt-Right really is in disarray because they just don't show up in force on these videos anymore. There are still assholes making response videos and yelling at me on Twitter, but it's nothing compared to what it used to be. I guess it helps that KiwiFarms is down.

I appreciate all of you very much for being here through this. It's been a hell of a year, smack in the middle of two and a half hell-years. I had to learn how to manage a spine injury, ADHD, and working in a pandemic on the job, none of which were things I expected to handle in my 30's. I've come a long way, and a lot of you kept food in my fridge while I did it, and you new folks signed on even after I was absent for so long. Thank you all. I don't intend to disappear like that ever again.

On which note:

The Next Sprint

At the present moment, I am working on a freelance gig. First one in a long while, actually! But the money is good and it's a cause I support. Finishing the new ARP took longer than expected so I got a late start on the gig, and it was looking like I'd have to go straight into crunch mode to get it done on time. Thankfully, the clients have pushed back the deadline because they want to keep drafting the script, so I suddenly have some room to celebrate/recover from the new video.

This also gives me some room to think about what I want to do next. The Cost of Doing Business was started right after I Hate Mondays, and, through all the CO-VIDs and my talk on GamerGate for UC Merced, it has always been The Next Thing. For two and a half years, it has been The Next Thing! And, given that it's the last traditional Alt-Right Playbook video, it feels very odd to be finished with it.

I have a lot of options for what to do next. As most of you know, I have the script for the Compendium video finished, and can start production on that if I want. There's also a completed script for the next Protagony. Either one could be The Next Thing. And I have some ideas kicking around for a video about neo-noir, or one about trip-hop, which would take advantage of my new hosts at Nebula, who don't have bots trawling the site for copyrighted material. Maybe it's time to do something about the Cornetto Trilogy or what the John Wick movies say about capitalism, which were ideas I never got to during CO-VIDs. (These later ones lend themselves to ad reads that Nebula can help me secure, though you'll always get ad-free versions here.)

I haven't fully decided where to put my energies yet. I am basking in the glow of a finished video for now. Join me in the sun! But I'll be taking some of the next couple weeks before the freelance gig ramps back up to see what gets me excited. News as it develops.

Nietzsche's Eternal Return (to Monkey Island)

As soon as the deadline for the gig got pushed back, I downloaded Return to Monkey Island and have been enjoying it very much. It's actually kind of wild how much I like it, given how little I enjoyed Thimbleweed Park. It honestly feels like a magic trick: this version of Guybrush feels continuous with all previous versions of Guybrush, even though none of them felt continuous with each other. It's just the right balance of the first game's naivete, the second's amorality, the third's wiseassery, and the fourth's dipshittery. I'm currently in Part IV, and the way it's suddenly opened up is tickling me. Like, up to this point it has completely followed the structure of the first Monkey Island, and then, right where you would expect the conclusion of that arc, it opens up into the structure of Monkey Island 2. It's also making me chuckle a fair bit! None of the returning characters feel like empty fan-service - they all serve a function beyond "hey, I recognize that" or wizened commentary on the series' legacy (though there's plenty of both). I don't know if, by the end of it, I will feel it's a great game, but so far it's a satisfying one, delivering something that has been missing from the series since Ron Gilbert left, while also growing and iterating on what worked before rather than simply rehashing it. It may end up more like a victory lap than a new masterpiece, but I could use a victory lap, and masterpiece feels within its grasp. (Though I've gathered the ending is polarizing, and I have, historically, not come down on Gilbert's side with his polarizing endings.)

Speaking of Nietzsche, I'm also finally watching Dark on Netflix. Or, rather, I watched the first four episodes a couple years ago and am finally watching the whole thing. (They mention Nietzsche a few times on the show; look, I didn't major in segues.) It's good! I mean, it's portentous as hell and I think episode 8 is the first time I heard something resembling levity, but it's also very fascinating if you can get on its wavelength. Honestly, I started watching it because I finished Tales from the Loop (which I mostly watched due to insomnia), a show whose fine-ness was so frustrating that I needed to watch something I knew was interesting, even if I bounced off it in the past. Anyway, highly recommend it if you like German time travel shenanigans. Who doesn't like German time travel shenanigans?!

Til next time,

-I